The Future of Work for Most of Us is Survival Work

In our memories of recent jolts to daily life, the 9/11 attacks, the 2008 financial meltdown, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the 2004 tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people across 14 countries, the destruction of life and property by hurricane Katrina along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, and many others, stand out.  COVID19 stands out differently.  All the others were massive jolts to particular people in particular places.  COVID19 is one of a growing wave of destructive events that will sweep over large parts of the world’s population, and sometimes everyone.  We are in the early stages of a massive wave of destructive events that will in one to two generations alter the entirety of our modern way of life.

We are used to thinking in terms of us and them, us and the weather, us and the oceans, us and other living things, yet our lives are connected to everything, literally everything, that makes up this globalized and overworked planet. Perhaps waves of extreme climate events, pandemics, and species die-offs are not the only waves of devastating events that climate change is visiting upon all living things on this planet. Perhaps even the seemingly solid earth itself is not untouchable by climate change.

A British scientist argues that global warming could lead to a future of more intense volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. And while some dismiss his views as preposterous, he points to a body of recent research that shows a troubling link between climate change and the Earth’s most destructive geological events.

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The most solid evidence for climatic influence on geology comes from the end of the last ice age, around 12,000 years ago, says McGuire, who is a volcanologist and professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. Analysis of volcanic deposits, published in the past decade by several authors, has found that this period of rapid climate change, when ice sheets retreated from much of the planet, coincided with a sudden outburst of geological activity. The incidence of volcanic eruptions in Iceland increased around 50-fold for about 1,500 years, before settling back to previous levels.

Fred Pearce, Could a Changing Climate Set Off Volcanoes and Quakes? Yale Environment 360, May 7, 2012.

The earthquakes in Turkey and Syria are another stark indicator of the future of work in 21st century.  News reports say more than 45 countries have offered to help Turkey and Syria with rescue efforts, thousands of rescue workers are on the scene, more than 21,000 have been killed and tens of thousands are homeless.  The number of people who are now unavailable to do the usual work of everyday life is small for a planetary human population of 8 billion people, but they have to be added to all the other workers being shifted out of lines of work that contribute to expanding affluence and the growth of a global middle class.  More and more workers are being drawn away to do the work of preventing, preparing for, and recovering from wars, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, mass shootings, and other disasters.

This shift is cutting deeply into the flows of human, animal, and machine energy that are available for all the things we want.  Climate change and the impacts of a too large and still growing human population on the earth’s many ecosystems and even its geology are forging a world of work that is not the work we really want to be doing.  No end to this ongoing shift in the tasks of work is in sight.

COVID19 and the Economics of Future Work: Exposing More Workers Too Soon May Permanently Damage the Global Workforce

SOURCE ITEMS

They think that the virus may bind to receptors on endothelial cells, which are found on the inside of blood vessels, like veins and arteries. It’s possible that the virus’s presence there triggers an immune reaction to the foreign substance which results in clotting, Morro says—and it’s those clots which, if they travel to the brain, can cause stroke.

Kat Eschner, COVID-19 is causing strokes in young people and doctors don’t know why, Popular Science, April 28, 2020.

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But experts are warning of possible long-term effects for patients after they’ve survived the coronavirus. Doctors know now that the disease attacks many systems within the body — from the lungs and heart to the liver and kidneys, says Yale cardiologist Dr. Harlan Krumholz.

Robin Young and Samantha Raphelson, As Patients Recover From Coronavirus, Doctors Wonder About Long-Term Health Impacts, Here and Now, April 28, 2020

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Overall, 1419 of 1555 patients survived for >90 days, with a mean follow-up period of 5.9 years. There was significantly higher long-term mortality among patients with pneumonia than among age-matched controls.

Eric M. Mortensen, Wishwa N. Kapoor, Chung-Chou H. Chang, and Michael J. Fine, Assessment of Mortality after Long-Term Follow-Up of Patients with Community-Acquired Pneumonia, Clinical Infectious Diseases, Volume 37, Issue 12, December 15, 2003.

COMMENTS

We are all trying to figure out what policy makers should decide about revving up the world economy.  From what I am reading, even the medical experts are not sure what can be resumed safely and what can’t.  As we reopen businesses, the people we are putting at greatest risk are the very people we rely on most to make the world economy hum with success.

One thing we are learning is that young and healthy workers may not be as safe from covid19 as we and they think.  Research is suggesting that while young people may face a much lower death rate, they may be facing long-term bad outcomes from covid19, including strokes leading to long term disability and greater susceptibility to debilitation and death from other disease traumas.  Long after the covid19 infection is a distant memory, working people and the world economy may still be paying the price of increasing worker exposure to covid19 too soon.

The long run costs in health and wealth from revving the economy too quickly may considerably outweigh the short run gains. For workers who survive covid19 infection, the possible lifelong health conditions will be physically painful and emotionally traumatic.  For their families, the expenses and the lost income because of lost work time will undermine economic well being.

The long run costs to the world economy will also be high.   A world economy with a large number of health compromised workers is a world economy with rising expenses (on top of the rising expenses of caring for a growing global population of older people, many with chronic illnesses)and declining productivity.   Caring for chronically health compromised workers diverts public wealth (both taxes and contributions to charities) away from funding critical investments and funding public goods that enhance the quality of life.  Workers with compromised health are off work more often and are less productive when on the job.

In a nation like the U.S., with an aging population and dependence on the output of workers in other parts of the world, the consequences will not be good.  Not only our own workforce will be health compromised, but also the global workforce that we have come to rely on.  The productivity of workers in the poorer nations that produce so much of what we consume will have very high rates of covid19 infections now and much lower productivity going forward.  Moreover, replenishing the U.S. workforce with healthy young workers from other parts of the world as our workers age out of the workforce will be more difficult and costly.  In such future circumstances the likely economic trajectory for the U.S. is a downward spiral – less wealth to pay for health; less health to create wealth.

Lesson from COVID19: the Work of Today and Tomorrow is Constructing a Way of Life for a New and Different Historical Era

In our memories of recent jolts to daily life, the 9/11 attacks, the 2008 financial meltdown, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the 2004 tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people across 14 countries, the destruction of life and property by hurricane Katrina along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, and many others, stand out.  COVID19 stands out differently.  All the others were massive jolts to particular people in particular places.  COVID19 is the only one that has swept up everyone on the planet.  It is the only one that seems to be a massive jolt to the entirety of our modern way of life.

Some observers are calling COVID19 a black swan event, meaning that it is very rare, and try to reassure us that things will eventually go back to normal.  In its particulars, COVID19 is a rare event, but it is best to see it as only the biggest so far in an accelerating wave of devastating events that is sweeping across the modern world.  Each disaster in its particulars is a rare event, but they happen within and are shaped by the conditions of our modern way of life, conditions that have never existed on this planet before.  The real black swan rarity is an earth that is dominated by a species (humans) with such enormous appetites for energy and materials and space, and with such enormous powers to feed those appetites that this species is undermining the biological and social infrastructures of its own existence.  The wave of disasters that is breaking upon us is very much a part of this unprecedented black swan rarity.

COVID19 is revealing with great clarity that our capitalist world of work is all wrong for this unfolding era in human history.  Over the last several centuries the modern world of work was created to serve two interlocked priorities: maximizing the comfort and convenience of an expanding middle class and maximizing the hoarding of wealth and power by the modern version of royal families.  The global conditions in which those priorities were tenable are now gone.  On a fully populated planet bound together by transportation and communication technologies into a single societal entity where a disaster for one people becomes a disaster for all peoples and with the juggernaut of climate change growing bigger and more menacing with every month, those work priorities are no longer tenable.  It is no longer tenable to sacrifice the natural and human made infrastructures of existence in one part of the world, to subsidize the royal families and their middle class enablers in other parts of the world.  It is no longer possible for the affluent and rich of the world to escape the consequences of the conditions that the feeding of their appetites creates.

The world that capitalism made has been moving deeper and deeper into crisis for decades.  Efforts by the world’s rich and the world’s affluent to hold out for a return to better times, especially by Americans, have piled up weapons systems, piled up mountains of public and private debt, and underfunded the maintenance of vital infrastructures.  These efforts to save the conditions of historically extreme comfort, convenience, and elite wealth are futile.  Human history shows us many examples of peoples who have tried to resist the multiplication of forces that make a particular way of life no longer possible.  Those efforts always failed.  In fact, those efforts made the inevitable deaths of those ways of life more destructive and devastating and the construction of a new way to live more difficult.

The American version of capitalism, which is practiced in many parts of the world, is no longer tenable.  The priorities that now drive the world of work have to go.  They will go.  In one way or another, they will disappear.  The best we can do is to not resist the inevitable death of much of modern life, but to accept that it is happening and has to happen.  The best we can do is to thoughtfully manage the death of the American version of modern life and replace it with priorities and ways of life that reconstruct and sustain the infrastructures necessary to human existence.  Sacrifices will be made; they are already being made.  Our task is to manage the forms and distributions of those sacrifices. Failure to do so will not prevent sacrifice; it will only make it more likely that annihilating wars for survival among groups organized along the classic dividing lines of modern life will determine who sacrifices and what they sacrifice.

Green Jobs But Not Green Prosperity

SOURCE ITEMS

Our statistical analysis shows that, to avoid a climate catastrophe, the future must be radically different from the past. Climate stabilization requires a fundamental disruption of hydrocarbon energy, production and transportation infrastructures, a massive upsetting of vested interests in fossil-fuel energy and industry, and large-scale public investment—and all this should be done sooner than later.

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Hence, if past performance is relevant for future outcomes, our results should put to bed the complacency concerning the possibility of “green growth.” There is no decoupling of growth and consumption-based CO2 emissions – “green growth” is a chimera. 

Enno Schröder and Servaas Storm, Why “Green Growth” Is an Illusion, Institute for New Economic Thinking, Dec 5, 2018.

COMMENTS

The evidence is accumulating that rapid economic growth is becoming a thing of the past, a brief moment in human history made possible by fossil fuels.  Our true earth-system energy income is the daily flow of solar power.  Briefly, we were able to jack up that energy income by using fossil fuels.  That time is ending.  The use of fossil fuels will decline, either because we choose to slow climate change and species extinctions or because continuing to overtax the earth-system’s current life producing processes slams the world-economy against the wall of massive climate and ecosystem paybacks.

For most of human history, jobs were tied to the solar energy flows.  In the affluent nations of our current world, most of our jobs are tied to fossil fuel energy income.  As fossil fuel use declines, our machine worlds (the one at work and the one at home) will have to shrink.  Our work lives will change and change again.  Slowly or rapidly, but inevitably, a transformation of the world of work and everything else about our lives is visible on the horizon.

Jobs in the Era of the Politics of Apocalypse

SOURCE ITEMS

This is a time of the politics of the apocalypse — an all-or-nothing view of the difference between winning and losing an election and of holding power or not holding it. There is no middle ground on what winning or losing means. This has been on the rise for a long time. But it has intensified of late. No one really knows how to roll it back. Politicians say that it is time for the country to come together. But on whose terms?

Dan Balz, Bomb scares and the politics of the apocalypse, Washington Post, October 24, 2018.

COMMENTS

Back in Cold War times many smaller nations tried to be non-aligned, not on either side of the conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union or China.  Neither the U.S. or the Soviet Union would allow that.  Political money and weapons poured into small nations to force a choice.  That was the geopolitical dynamic of conflicting ideologies and programs of all or nothing.  It was inescapable; it was unresolvable until one or the other side was beaten into submission.  After that, the world’s nations had only one choice.

This is the dynamic of the politics of apocalypse in the U.S. and across much of the world.  Decades ago, here in the U.S. many middle class Americans chose non-alignment through third party movements and political disengagement.  Back then, this was a politically affordable luxury facilitated by the continuing weakness of the extreme right wing.  But, that shift to non-alignment and disengagement gutted the moderate wings of both the Republican and Democratic parties.  The right wing was becoming less affluent and more militant while the left wing continued to enjoy much offered by middle class affluence and remained relatively passive – until it was too late.  We have now entered into a state of affairs in which non-alignment and disengagement are no longer viable choices.  The right wing has engendered a long march for all or nothing which can only be satisfied by the capitulation of the left.  To my knowledge when such apocalyptic challenges have arisen, such as the clash over control of the formation of new states in the western territories and the spread of the institution of slavery in the 1850s in the U.S., the left has never capitulated.  Nor has the right ever capitulated.  The only outcome now possible is apocalyptic victory for one side or the other.

So, what does this mean for jobs?  If you check out the employment reports put out monthly by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, you will have noticed that most job growth is in services and a big chunk of those jobs are in social services and health care.  This is to be expected.  Suicide, family crises, workplace accidents, random acts of violence, epidemics of depression, violence, and preventable diseases are to be expected in times of apocalyptic political polarization.   Overwhelming stresses drive immediate emotions to the front, short-circuiting the intellectual capacity to look down the road behind us and up the road in front of us.  People become overly oriented  to the here and now , which makes us more susceptible to ideological scammers who take advantage of emotional vulnerabilities and more limited understandings of our situations.

So, workforce growth is now being forced into two complementary paths: jobs causing destruction (both legal and illegal) and jobs assigned the work of repairing the destruction to everyday life (both paid and volunteer).  Take a look at the massive number of personnel that was deployed in Pittsburgh to deal with one event of destruction and consider the enormous volume of costly equipment involved.  Multiply  that response by a thousand times a day across the world.  Throw in the industries and business support services required to create and maintain the military and policing forces and social and health services required to respond to these destructive events.  Now allow yourself to accept that the scope of the global conflict will continue to escalate as the extreme right wing assault on democracy and human rights continues to grow, as right wing governments take control of more and more of the world’s military and policing forces, as more non-violent and violent acts of resistance are mobilized, and safe havens from the conflict continue to disappear.

The world of work is not separate from these trends.  It is being polarized right along side the polarization of our politics.  More and more our work choices are between those that create destruction and those that try to prevent destruction and those that involve repairing and replacing what has been damaged and destroyed.

All of this, of course, has to be understood in the context of the ending of the era of real growth in wealth.  That real growth was fueled by growth in the use of fossil fuels to augment human labor and to power technologies that require an intensity of energy flows that cannot be match by massing together armies of workers.  We are still pumping more and more fossil fuel energy into the world economy, but monitoring and repairing the destructive side effects (current and cumulative, environmental and geopolitical) now require the consumption of more wealth than the increase in fossil fuel use produces.   Thus the politics and jobs of apocalypse are very much the politics and jobs of a world of people trying to protect themselves from the losses of wealth that are happening all around them.  The wealth losses take many forms.  Some, like the loss of quietness in the night and open spaces where a person can seek solitude, we only notice when we try to take account.  But, the emotional toll is still very real and very costly.

The Dictatorship of Climate Change: Creating Jobs for Now and the Future

SOURCE ITEMS

A dangerous, large-scale feedback loop that promotes wildfires has emerged. Forests, woodlands and grasslands hold much of Earth’s terrestrial carbon. When they burn, more carbon dioxide is released, increasing concentrations in the atmosphere and causing land and sea surface temperatures to rise. This warming increases the likelihood of even more widespread and intense fires and exacerbates the severe weather and sea level rise we are now beginning to experience.

Don J. Melnick, Mary C. Pearl and Mark A. Cochrane. The Earth Ablaze. New York Times. August 8, 2018.

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Changes in the greenhouse gas concentrations and other drivers alter the global climate and bring about myriad human health consequences. Environmental consequences of climate change, such as extreme heat waves, rising sea-levels, changes in precipitation resulting in flooding and droughts, intense hurricanes, and degraded air quality, affect directly and indirectly the physical, social, and psychological health of humans.  For instance, changes in precipitation are creating changes in the availability and quantity of water, as well as resulting in extreme weather events such as intense hurricanes and flooding.  Climate change can be a driver of disease migration, as well as exacerbate health effects resulting from the release of toxic air pollutants in vulnerable populations such as children, the elderly, and those with asthma or cardiovascular disease.

Climate and Human Health, Health Impacts webpage. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Accessed August 9, 2018.

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Humanity’s challenge then is to influence the dynamical properties of the Earth System in such a way that the emerging unstable conditions in the zone between the Holocene and a very hot state become a de facto stable intermediate state (Stabilized Earth) … This requires that humans take deliberate, integral, and adaptive steps to reduce dangerous impacts on the Earth System, effectively monitoring and changing behavior to form feedback loops that stabilize this intermediate state.

Will Steffen, Johan Rockström, et al. Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 6, 2018.

COMMENTS

It is now well established that we are increasingly living under the steadily growing power of a climate change dictatorship that we brought into being.  The chance to choose a future of greater freedom is gone.  This global dictatorship will come to dominate our every waking hour and every aspect of our lives, including our work lives.  Our jobs will increasingly be the jobs forced on us by this dictatorship as it works its will on this planet with no concern for any of us.

Note that the “intermediate state” referred to in the Trajectories article is not a restoration to the cooler earth of a century ago.  It is a possible state of things that we must work hard to achieve, yet even if we bring this “intermediate state” into being, it will not be benign.  It will still inflict much ruin on our lives; it will still force us to create massive numbers of survival jobs that do not create new wealth or enhance our lives.  At best these jobs will sustain something close to the level of global human welfare we have now.  More likely, given how unwilling humans are to make proactive changes that make life less convenient and comfortable, we will not create the necessary wealth saving jobs fast enough to prevent massive losses of existing wealth.

Across the world, we can expect to see massive shifts in our work lives as the dictatorship of climate change becomes more demanding.  Just for starters, we should expect to see many more jobs in these categories of work:

  • Monitoring the conditions of the entire earth and initiating counter measures when that “intermediate state” begins to wobble in the wrong way.
  • Repairing and replacing wealth that is increasingly lost to the extreme weather events and political upheavals that will necessarily be part of a less hospitable “intermediate state” earth.
  • Population control – anger management counselors, psychiatrists and psychologists, prison guards, prosecutors, police officers, soldiers (in regular armed forces, in insurgent armed forces, and in unregulated militias and criminal organizations).
  • Medical services – to handle victims of interpersonal violence, political violence, and disease epidemics facilitated by hotter temperatures and more moisture in the atmosphere.
  • Construction – to build and maintain sea walls and levies, to reinforce existing structures against more severe stresses, to relocate homes and businesses away from flood zones, and to build border walls to check the flow of desperation driven refugees fleeing from climate change ravaged parts of the world.
  • Governmental agencies — to manage and fund the far reaching global responses to climate change crises.
  • Manufacturing — to provide equipment and supplies to facilitate all the other workforce changes taking place.

These are some of the most visible global workforce changes coming our way.  However, virtually no part of the world economy and no job will be untouched by the increasingly powerful dictatorship of climate change and the demands it is making.

 

Explaining Workforce Changes: Working with an Inclusive Perspective Looks More Promising

SOURCE ITEMS

Some years ago, skeptical scientists began to question these methods, observing, for example, that cancer cells in a petri dish behave so differently from tumors in a human body as to cast doubt on much conventional research.

Gabriel Popkin, Cancer and the artillery of physics, Johns Hopkins Magazine, Spring 2018.  Accessed March 22, 2018.

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The tools we use to help us think—from language to smartphones—may be part of thought itself.

Larissa MacFarquhar, The Mind-Expanding Ideas of Andy Clark, New Yorker Magazine, April 2, 2018.  Accessed May 11, 2018.

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Scientists have confirmed a longstanding hypothesis that Earth’s orbit is warped by the gravitational pull of Jupiter and Venus in an epic cycle that repeats regularly every 405,000 years.

Peter Dockrill, Jupiter And Venus Are Warping Earth’s Orbit, and It’s Linked to Major Climate Events, ScienceAlert, May 8, 2018.

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And including microbiome characteristics when predicting people’s traits, such as cholesterol levels or obesity, makes those estimates more accurate than only personal history, such as diet, age, gender, and quality of life, the study finds.

Jim Daley, Environment, Not Genetics, Primarily Shapes Microbiome Composition, The Scientist, February 28, 2018.  Accessed May 11, 2018.

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For another, researchers often focus their attention on just a few interesting microbes, “and people just don’t look at what the remaining things are,” Kowarsky said. “There probably are some interesting, novel things there, but it’s not relevant to the experiment people want to do at that time.”

More than 99 percent of the microbes inside us are unknown to science, ScienceDaily, August 23, 2017.  Accessed May 11, 2018.

COMMENTS

Increasingly, researchers across a variety of fields are discovering that better knowledge of our selves and our world is produced by making the units of analysis used in research more inclusive and more dynamic.  The standard entities we use in everyday language (e.g., the body, the family, the city, the nation, the ecosystem) are often not the most productive units of analysis for scientific research.  They externalize and hide much that is really part of the actual system of causation and they tend to leave the evolution of entities and boundaries over time out of consideration.

The implications of new understandings in the physical and biological sciences for the social sciences are significant.  Studying kinship groups or cities or nations in a short time frame as though such entities and time frames enclose everything that is explanatorily relevant is less likely to produce durable explanations than we have thought.  We will be better served, it appears, by embracing a more inclusive research perspective.

Most scientific research is done by starting from hypotheses with only two or a few variables, and then perhaps, adding in one or two variables at a time in a search for a still simple but sufficient explanation.  In this approach, the field of inquiry is kept as limited as possible.  The research path is from simplicity to complexity, with the assumption that a fairly simple explanation will be found.

This attempt at simplicity is not only spatial, it is also temporal.  The explanations being sought must not only be simple, they must be time proof.  This is another simplifying premise.  There is no history that must be studied; measuring variables in one short period of time is assumed to suffice for confirming or disconfirming the full range of hypothesized explanatory relationships.

This approach is desirable because simple hypothesized explanations make possible low cost research and simple policy and treatment interventions.  However, the approach brings with it a major source of confusion and controversy.  Even for a system composed of only a few variable components, the number of possible two or three variable hypotheses is quite large.  Add in a temporal dimension and the range of competing hypotheses grows even larger.  For a real world research question, the wide range of explanatory hypotheses possible invites numerous competing and contradictory explanations.  Moreover, given the evidence that research findings are quite often wrong, each researcher is also inclined to hold tight to their particular simple explanation as long as even one study seems to confirm it.  Over the long run, the multiplication of attempts at simple explanations can run up quite a tab for research funders and yet produce very disappointing explanations.

The rise of complexity theories and the increasing use of dynamic systems thinking in research suggest an alternative research approach: starting with a unit of analysis that is as spatially inclusive as seems plausible and studying it over a significant period of time seems likely to be more fruitful that the current approach.  In this approach, researchers would start with complexity and work toward simplicity, eliminating factors that can be shown to be causally inconsequential.  This approach has four advantages.  First, it aligns with the growing number of studies that show that the system totalities that matter are larger and more inclusive than we have thought.  Second, it is more likely to define a common research orientation for the many research institutes and researchers studying the same topic. Third, the inclusion of time gives researchers a better chance to learn whether a discovered explanatory system is evolving over time or is stable.  Finally, it aligns with the scientific principle that we can prove that a causal relationship doesn’t always hold, but we cannot prove that it does always hold.

For the study of workforce changes the Inclusive World Economy perspective that I have adopted (and which is derived from the World-Systems concept developed by Immanuel Wallerstein) provides the kind of system totality that probably encompasses all the possibilities for explaining changes in employment.  It also makes it easier for many workforce change researchers to adopt the same research orienting perspective even while focusing on different hypotheses.  We start with the grand hypothesis that policies, practices, and events in every part of the world and every part of nature have consequences for workforce changes in the U.S.  We add to that the premise that explanatory constancy cannot be taken for granted; it must be demonstrated, not assumed.  The shared research task is to work inward, throwing out factors that can be shown to be minimally relevant to the workforce topic being studied.  We still make use of existing research findings, but instead of looking for research that shows which variables have explanatory efficacy, we look for research that shows which variables have been found in multiple studies to have little or no explanatory efficacy.  A simple explanation is not the starting point in the search for a sufficient explanation; it is only a possible end to that search.

Widely adopting this approach would be a big shift in how we study workforce change, but it should be a fruitful shift.  A growing record of explanatory controversies and failures in the social science fields begs for a new approach, and developments in the physical and biological sciences suggest that adequate explanations for workforce changes will involve more factors and be more complex than has been assumed.  These things given, working from the inclusive and complex toward the simple should be at least as efficient in the expenditure of time and money as is the approach that now dominates the study of workforce changes and so often disappoints.

Work and the Transition to a Solar Future: A Perspective

Societal change is an unavoidable constant.  The totality of humans, other species, and physical earth systems constitute a single economy (the Inclusive World Economy) that is continuously evolving.  This global process of change is driven by the constant flow of energy from the sun.  Energy must do what it does: change the materials it interacts with and change the forms in which it presents itself.  Materials must do what they do: interact with the flows of energy, be changed, and facilitate the transformation of energy forms into different energy forms. As part of this enormous configuration of processes I call the Inclusive World Economy, the world of work must continuously become different and we must become different in dynamic association with this process — but not necessarily in the ways or at the speed we expect or want.

We humans are among the vast array of material instruments through which the flow of solar energy drives change.  Work is the primary way in which we are instruments of change.  In the last several centuries we have vastly expanded and continue to expand the human role in the processes of change in the Inclusive World Economy.  We did this by borrowing solar energy from the past (stored as fossil fuels) and adding it to the flow of solar energy that daily fuels earth’s myriad systems.[1] This dramatic daily increase in the flow of energy through the Inclusive World Economy accelerated and continues to accelerate the global processes of societal and earth systems change, has changed and continues to change the way societal and earth systems change takes place, and has transformed and continues to transform us and almost everything about our planet.

We already know that we can’t keep increasing the use of fossil fuels to augment the daily flow of solar energy.  We have to dramatically limit our borrowing from past solar energy income.  More unsettling is the possibility that we must learn to share the budget of current solar energy flow with other species and with various earth system processes – such as cleansing water through solar powered processes – to a much greater extent than we now think.  We just do not know how much solar energy we can divert from other species and processes in the Inclusive World Economy without generating a new round of system level changes that are both massive and destructive to human wellbeing.

In a large, complex, and dynamic system, system level change can remain evolutionary even while subsystems are going through deep and far reaching change and components are being created and destroyed at a rapid pace.  This is what is now happening in the Inclusive World Economy.  Species are being destroyed; whole communities of people are losing their ways of life; institutions that have been central to our wellbeing are losing there effectiveness and new institutional arrangements are popping up; planetary threats that we have never encountered before have emerged.  The effects of climate change, species loss, limits to vital resources like fresh water and arable land, and conflicts over these things are multiplying and coming faster and faster.

Not surprisingly, the world’s institutional arrangements, which we took for granted only a few decades ago, are becoming dysfunctional in various ways and being subjected to mounting attacks from various quarters.  This is happening to the world of work, where big changes are under way and conflicts over these changes are growing.  The pay and benefits associated with high end jobs are disappearing; protections against harmful work environments are being weakened; more and more jobs involve the work of repairing the damages inflicted by climate change, wars, and illegal business operations.  The world’s stock of wealth (including its people) is growing older, forcing us to devote much more of our work activity to fighting the ordinary ravages of time.

Everything in the Inclusive World Economy is connected, so this is a very dynamic situation.  No one can escape this global upheaval, so everyone is or will be forced to respond to and manage the specific forms in which these massive and life-altering global crises visit us.  As we take actions to respond, every other part of the Inclusive World Economy will change in response to our actions.   Ironically, as we do more to respond to the crises by exerting more technological control over other species and earth systems rather than adapting our own activities to the laws of the universe as they operate in the Inclusive World Economy, the more we accelerate the intensification of the crises.  Unwittingly and carelessly, we have pushed the Inclusive World Economy into a new and dangerous era of change.

In this increasingly hostile global environment, many of us are already struggling with life-altering consequences of these global crises.  Where this is happening, working people are experimenting with old and new ways of making a living and old and new ways of protecting their work opportunities. They have no choice.  But, some of these efforts only work for the short term because they propagate effects through the dynamic processes at work in the Inclusive World Economy to intensify crises and create new ones.

The future of work is uncertain, but at the moment bad outcomes look more likely than good outcomes.  Rising support for authoritarian governments that divide the world’s workers into categories and help one category by taking from the others is accelerating the destruction of the very institutions we need to respond to global crises effectively.  Much more importantly, though, the world’s leaders continue to strongly embrace the idea that the economic growth “miracle” of the last two centuries has no end in sight.  If only we make the right policy choices,  they continue to claim, the material riches of the world can continue to grow, everyone can enjoy a share of those riches, and the crises will wither away like so many storm clouds.

From the perspective of the Inclusive World Economy, the end of the material growth miracle is right in front of us.  The era of fossil fuel energy is coming to an end, the world’s material riches are beginning to diminish, and the world of work is changing quickly.  A shift to solar energy, no matter how successful and complete, will not sustain the material wealth miracle created by massive fossil fuel energy flows.  The only choice before us is how we make the shift to a world of less.  For now, a democratic and equitable shift seems very out of reach, but an authoritarian and inhumane transition is not inevitable.  An inclusive perspective, attention to the limits of a solar future, and hard and careful political work can move the world in the direction of a much more desirable future than the one now looming darkly on the horizon.

[1] In economics we borrow from future income to augment current income.  In the case of energy, however, we can borrow from past solar energy income.

Tax Cuts and American Jobs: Where will the Corporations Put Their Tax Savings?

SOURCE ITEMS

Imagine all enterprise functions automated by software and performed through a single point of access, which happens to be a virtual agent with cognitive capabilities. You can stop imagining and start thinking about the repercussions, because this is much closer than you may think.

…

I have not met a single CEO, from Deutsche Bank to JP Morgan, who said to me: ‘ok, this will increase our productivity by a huge amount, but it’s going to have social impact — wait, let’s think about it’.

George Anadiotis, Who’s automating the enterprise? Meet Amelia and the future of work, ZDNet, November 8, 2017.  Accessed November 8, 2017.

COMMENTS

In commenting on the proposed tax cuts for businesses in the U.S., numerous business analysts have pointed out that many global corporations have lots of cash on hand (much of it off shore) and that borrowing costs are very low.  If there were investment opportunities in the U.S. that promised a decent return, those corporations would be using that cash and borrowing capital.

Profits have been rising largely via cost cutting and swallowing up rivals rather than through the growing incomes of customers and clients.  Can workers in the U.S. really expect U.S. corporations to change investment strategies solely because their cash holdings overflow even more?

Even if the tax cuts went to U.S. consumers, the impact on investment strategies would be minimal – unless Trump succeeds in creating a U.S. market protected from imported consumer goods.  Tax cuts and automation are not the private domain of U.S. economic policy; Germany and China and all the other players can be expected to respond with their own investment incentives, so increased U.S. consumer spending would almost certainly distribute new investment across the world economy, resulting in more automation, more global displacement of working people, more profits, more wealth inequality, and more damage to the natural environment.

It is worth noting one more thing from the article cited above.  Business operations can now be automated very quickly, much more quickly than underfunded retraining programs can retrain workers and return them to work.  This mismatch between the speed of business innovation and the speed of government responses to worker displacement and income losses will only get worse.

Hurricane Harvey: Good News for Jobs; Bad News for Wealth

SOURCES

Harvey to be costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, with an estimated cost of $160 billion

USAToday Headline, August 30, 2017.

COMMENTS

The massive destruction of property caused by hurricane Harvey will certainly increase demand for goods and services – for building materials, machinery, and appliances for countless construction projects; for health care services and disaster related government services; and for countless personal items that have been lost.  Even though the disruption of Gulf Coast businesses and industries has idled workers in that area, the longer term impact on job growth will be large and positive.  The U.S. might finally see wage growth and more people coming back into the labor force.

Yet, there is a catch.  Massive destruction like we have seen with hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, and Harvey reduces the total wealth in the U.S.  On average, the quality of life in the U.S. declines.  That means that most if not all of the added jobs will only only contribute to replacing lost wealth, not adding to the total stock of wealth.  (It is also worth adding that many of the goods that go into restoring the lost wealth will be imported, so some disaster induced job growth will be exported to low wage parts of the world.)

The bigger point is that we have to see Harvey’s impact on job growth as part of an epochal change in  job growth for the U.S. and for the world economy.  Three forces are coming together to accelerate the destruction of existing wealth in the world economy: climate change, which is producing more extreme weather events and putting negative pressures on the world’s agricultural industries; increasing civil strife and wars, which are destroying massive amounts of existing wealth in some places and forcing up the costs of protecting existing wealth everywhere on the planet; and the aging of the massive amount of wealth items produced and put in place over the course of the 20th century, which is accelerating the rates at which those items of existing wealth must be repaired and replaced.  These forces are transforming global employment.

In these historical circumstances, there will be plenty of jobs for the world’s people, but they will all be devoted to protecting existing wealth (military and policing forces, home security services, property insurance services, etc.) and to replacing wealth that is being lost.  Plenty of jobs, but a very big social justice question is emerging in this era of no net wealth growth: how do we fairly allocate jobs and income when trickle down wealth growth has come to an end?