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"Philosophically, the Brooks and Rajan essays are interesting for the way they awkwardly combine an old-fashioned style of conservatism (the poor will always be with us, accept your lot) with a more modern form of inclusive neoliberalism (accept deregulation, and you too can be rich!) By itself, the first style of argument is simply intolerable to modern sensibilities, but the crisis has rendered the second increasingly implausible. Together, however, the two arguments add up to nonsense.
The simplest response is that self-styled critics of “structural” economic problems are not being structural enough. The existence of a hyper-polarized wage structure is not a fact of nature but is itself a structural problem, and one that has been facilitated by specific policy choices. What we need is not “human capital” but a shift away from protecting rentiers and toward strengthening the bargaining position of labor."
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There is an odd dissonance in these accounts, however, one that’s more obvious in Rajan’s version than in Brooks’. First, we are told that the stagnation of wages and the disappearance of jobs is an unchangeable structural fact: globalization and technology dictate that the demand for labor will be split between a handful of high-skill, “superstar” jobs and a mass of menial, poverty-wage service work. Yet we are also told that we face a deficit of “human capital”, implying that adequate education is all that anyone needs to escape the trap of unemployment or low wages.
"Just as American manufacturing turned belly-up in the face of the out-sourcing of labor in the globalized market in the 1990s, higher ed is now poised to do exactly the same thing with the professoriate.
Distance learning, the fastest growing segment of the higher education market, will make it possible for a Ph.D. in New Delhi to teach that big section of Chemistry 100 to students from all over the world. And in New Delhi, $4,000 will probably seem like pretty good money."
"This post brings together several threads I've been pondering recently: the explosion of conversation over the new aesthetic (see Ian Bogost and Bruce Sterling), conversation about the future of digital humanities (see Steven Ramsay and Ted Underwood), and an insightful post from Cathy Davidson on attention and education."
A point I've argued many times but usually fail to convince.
"Most American workers labor under the auspices of employment-at-will, which allows employers to hire, fire and promote for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reason at all. "
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As academic Corey Robin notes in his book, Fear: The History of a Political Idea, employers have wantonly exercised this power, and the judiciary has repeatedly upheld this despotic state of affairs. The courts have backed employers' right to fire their workers for such non-work related reasons as “carrying on extramarital affairs; participating in group sex at home; having children out of wedlock; smoking on the job; wearing, in the case of off-duty male police officers, an earring; and carrying on relationships and friendships with coworkers or employees of a competitor.”
"But it turns out that nobody hates a free market more than the capitalist class. It was Adam Smith who observed that “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” The unwillingness of really existing capitalism to face market competition goes beyond a complacent assumption of the right to cheap labor. It’s at the foundation of Ashwin Parameswaran’s far-reaching account of our current troubles, which he traces to a “system where incumbent corporates do not face competitive pressure to engage in risky exploratory investment.” "
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On this reading, a big part of the historical mission of the Left was to make capitalism as revolutionary in reality as it was in its own ideological self-conception. Marx wrote admiringly of the revolutionary élan of the bourgeoisie, which “cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.” But according to Tronti, the capitalist must be dragged kicking and screaming into this revolutionary fervor. Just as Corey Robin argues that right wing political theory borrows from its revolutionary antagonists in its defense of hierarchy, capitalist production adopts radical measures to defend the prerogatives of accumulation, but only in response to working class challenges. Creative destruction is only ignited by the sparks thrown off from class struggle.
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This perspective also casts the figure of the left neoliberal in a different light. The arguments I’ve described as left-neoliberal rely on certain free market tropes: competition, deregulation, efficiency. But taking such tropes seriously is perhaps more subversive than it appears, since actually existing neoliberal capitalism is not consistently based on any of these principles. It is instead, as David Harvey has said, a project of class power. In another of his essays, “Against Kamikaze Capitalism”, Graeber contends that “Whenever there is a choice between the political goal of undercutting social movements—especially, by convincing everyone there is no viable alternative to the capitalist order—and actually running a viable capitalist order, neoliberalism means always choosing the first.” So perhaps it’s not so surprising to see University of Chicago finance professors attempting to save capitalism from the capitalists, while two other mainstream economists express their hope that it will be Occupy Wall Street that ultimately helps save capitalism from itself.
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So I like to be able to simultaneously speak about the personality of an organisation (the abstraction) and how that abstraction manifests in action -- that is, the behaviours of individuals and much smaller groups. This is my route to figuring out how to change an organisation... and honestly, getting an organisation to produce a new product or support a new concept is always going to involve change, because if the organisation didn't need to change then it would already be doing whatever we've been brought in to help with.
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The DuPont Equation.
Bang! Read that again. Each of the three components of the equation is a top-level division of the company, as separately run as it is possible to do, with different goals, requiring a different mentality from the people in the divisions.
"However, from talking to numerous faculty members and academics from a variety of institutions, it has become clear to me that a central problem remains: none of these extra-curricular activities matter when a job search committee determines which graduate student to invite for an interview, and they do not matter for tenure. These facts make it subtly clear that, as a whole, the modern American academy expresses a keen indifference toward the relationship between academic knowledge and the public interest/public good"
Comments, mostly con, on "The precariat is a flexible workforce reliant on short-term employment. They’re temps, part-timers, seasonal laborers, freelancers, even interns — people without traditional unions to rely on. There is nothing below them, only the safety net’s tatters. “[Their] lives and identities are made up of disjointed bits, in which they cannot construct a desirable narrative or build a career, combining forms of work and labour, play and leisure in a sustainable way.”"
The division of cognitive labor is fundamental to all cultures. Adults have a strong sense of how knowledge is clustered in the world around them and use that sense to access additional information, defer to relevant experts, and ground their own incomplete understandings. One prominent way of clustering knowledge is by disciplines similar to those that comprise the natural and social sciences. Seven studies explored an emerging sense of these discipline-based ways of clustering of knowledge. Even 5-year-olds could cluster knowledge in a manner roughly corresponding to the departments of natural and social sciences in a university, doing so without any explicit awareness of those academic disciplines. But this awareness is fragile early on and competes with other ways of clustering knowledge. Over the next few years, children come to see discipline-based clusters as having a privileged status, one that may be linked to increasingly sophisticated assumptions about essences for natural kinds. Possible mechanisms for this developmental shift are examined.
"But it’s in the recommendations for adapting to technological change that this book really falls short. The program for winning the future, it turns out, consists of encouraging entrepreneurship and improving education. The former, the authors say, will allow us to discover a bounty of new ways of employing people, through the magic of Hayekian tacit knowledge and Schumpeterian creative destruction. And an improved education system will ensure that the general population has the necessary human capital to participate in this magical new economy. This is a remarkably thin vision, redolent of the kind of popular techno-libertarianism that flourished at the height of the dot-com bubble, and it’s no more compelling now than it was then."
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But if technology really is dramatically reducing the need for human labor, then we have an opportunity to think bigger and better, getting beyond merely trying to scrape up new skills and new jobs for the displaced proletariat. If you’re a regular reader, you know where I’m going with this by now; as somebody said of one of my earlier renditions on this theme, “we get it–Peter Frase hates work”. Totally missing from Race Against the Machine is any consideration that we might take some of our productivity gains in the form of free time rather than income. Nowhere do the authors even contemplate reducing the length of the work week and work year, or accepting a lower labor-force participation rate. Thus, despite constantly reminding us of all the ways in which technology has improved our standard of living and transformed society, Brynjolfsson and McAfee never question the centrality of wage labor in its current form: they never consider that there is any alternative to a society in which everyone expects, and is expected, to spend the bulk of their life as a 40 (or more) hour per week wage laborer, or as a profit-maximizing “entrepreneur”.
"The facts of the matter are stark: larger businesses are more productive (this will come as a shock to anybody who spends most of their life in meetings, but it seems to be true), and they even create more jobs, once you control for firm age. Or, to put it another way: it’s not small businesses which create jobs, it’s startups."
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