Category Archives: Ron

Let’s face it…work is a mess…for many people, it’s gone and not coming back.  And for those left?  I wonder how many people actually like what they do as opposed to just getting a paycheck.

Our politicians think they can fix the work mess.  Both left and right flail away about work in ways that more match their particular pair of rose-colored glasses (thank you, Immanuel Kant!)  but what if what we are going through with work is….a divorce?

Work doesn’t want us anymore; but we cling to it, hope it will still love us, lie to ourselves about how much we still love it, and Work is the party that sees through the self deceiving BS.  Neither party is sure where they are going next; they just don’t want to be together, deep down, any more.  We say it’s necessary to stay together, but if you’ve ever been that situation, all you can think about is getting out, getting away from that which is causing you a lot of pain, necessity or no.

People getting divorced can’t see an upside when they’re going through it, all they are feeling is pain.  But once apart, you can begin to heal yourself and come back around to “being productive”, which, in this case, we have no idea what that means.

I saw this over at Ace of Spades and thought I have to post it here as well!  Thus, the revival…

A report from researchers at Oxford has suggested that almost half of American jobs will be replaced by technology.  While this sounds mighty grim, the upside take from the article is that this will emphasize the development of more creative and social skills.    This would certainly be an interesting society!  Full of writers and musicians?  Maybe….but perhaps people will be more creative about things they are not about now.  More refined solutions to ever more complex human problems!

This also hits an EOW theme….how can we really place psychological value in work when so many forces are trying to take it away from us?

One post in like 6 months is a sure sign this blog is moribund.  Upon reflection, I’m not sure that a blog was the right way to approach this topic, which is still in my head a lot.  I don’t mean to beat myself up over doing this as a blog; it just didn’t really give me what I’ve needed to have, and I suspect I haven’t really given the readers what they wanted to see.

I’m open to what people want to say about this in the comments and perhaps I can find a way to get back to this as a blog again….otherwise, not so much.

So I was watching Washington Journal on C-SPAN this morning and they were talking about the soon-to-be released 1940 census.

Much of the discussion was centered around charts and data…and comparison to the 2010 data.

Based on the 2010 data the percentage of Americans working in BOTH agriculture AND manufacturing is…12%!

Think about that — only 1 person in 8 in America grows food or makes things….wow.

Here is an article that distills a lot of what we’ve been talking about here at EOW into two simple categories:

Physical work, which is the first work to get extensively automated and

Mental work, which is now, relatively recently, getting the same systematic treatment that older physical work has.

Here’s a paragraph that hooked me:

To be frank, I’m not that sorry for them. Over the years, I have come to realize just how many skilled white-collar professionals are just phoning it in when they go to work every day. They fill out paperwork and connect the easy dots in pre-established formulas, rather than doing original, creative, conceptual thinking. Chances are you’ve seen one of those “mystery diagnosis” shows on cable TV, the ones that tell you the story of some guy who suffers a mysterious, debilitating ailment for years before he finally finds a specialist who tells him he has some rare disease. It seems like every one of those shows begins with a doctor who listens to the patient’s symptoms, plugs them into a common, familiar, and completely wrong diagnosis, and then lets it go at that. It begins with a doctor who’s going through the motions rather than doing original thinking to solve the problem.

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the falling value (and rising price) of a university diploma, and this is part of the reason for it. Much of a contemporary university education is designed to train dot-connectors, to fill students’ heads with established formulas and the received wisdom, but not to teach the kind of creative problem-solving that can only be learned, in my experience, by going beyond the canned knowledge peddled in the classroom and dealing with actual, real-world challenges.

[my emphasis]

 

It also strikes me how many “knowledge professionals” want to race to stuff some problem they’ve encountered into a known (to them) model or paradigm because it relates so strongly to how they make profit in their work.  The irony to me is how they racing to become…machine like.  Is it any wonder than we want the REAL machines to do more and more of these tasks?

For purposes of this blog, history really begins at the point where we go from being an agricultural economy/culture to….whatever comes next, usually industrialization.  And when we go from that second phase of economy to what we are now….that change happens faster and harder than the first.  And what we’re going through now?  I see the flames coming outta the engine of the Batmobile my friends!   This set of cycles, these ‘interlocking rings’ of tech, economy and culture are going on everywhere not just the US or Europe.  To be sure, how other places do this doesn’t have to replicate our experience, but may be informed by it.  Iceland went from an almost Medieval culture at the start of the 20th century to building modern cities, poof, from whole cloth thanks to the economic miracle known as the codfish! (See, Cod by Mark Kurlansky, one of my favorite books of the last few years!)

But it is quite sobering how much evil and suffering have occurred throughout the world in the same relatively short time.  When I read accounts of the First Battle of the Marne in WWI, I wind up feeling like we just handed monkeys machine guns and artillery and let them kill 100,000 people and wound another 400,000….in a week.  Even more sobering….that’s merely the tip of the iceberg of horrors in the last 150 years.  You know the names of the more famous horrors; do I have to spell them out?

Plus, there’s nothing to say that things won’t even get worse.  That’s the danger in times like this; the ‘solutions’ we think make sense may indeed damage things, well, I won’t say ‘beyond repair’, but such that fixing them will be exceptionally difficult.  Once we get behind bad ideas they entrench just as deeply as good ones.

But if there’s one thing I have confidence in, especially in America, is that we will work out things and the flaws of the old regime will be things we make fun of in the future.  I think it’s because we really don’t value the past all that much.  I know a lot of people that view this as a flaw, but I generally don’t!  There comes a point when we’ve peaked out with the old ways even though it’s hard to see.  I’ve long believed that everything becomes its own parody.

And, sort of amazingly, even older things get better than they were.  We’re far better at growing food than we were 150 years ago, and we’re better, more effective manufacturers than we were 70 years ago.  So, while we ride the wave of change, remember that we will find a way to build on what we’ve done.  The “information economy” we’ve been building for the last 30-40 years I view as kind of developing a ‘central nervous system’  for us as a culture.   But what brain will form from this?

Not everything here on End of Work….we’re looking to get out of this mess we are in as both individuals and as a nation.

So we’re starting to see that the frustration with the current way things are is now leading to the rejection of the Old Ways and we begin to search for the new.  This article in the Atlantic is one of several that are starting to point the way.  Now, I’m as sure about how much these changes will come from any one geographic region, as this writer is stressing the South, but let me give you a nice quote from it I really liked.

Most places, he says, might as well be sprayed with “startupicide.” Startupicide is what damps down and repels startups and those who would build them. “I could see the average town was like a roach motel for startup ambitions,” he writes. “Smart, ambitious people went in, but no startups came out.”

Startups are fragile things by their very nature — few succeed even under the best of circumstances. What makes Silicon Valley and a very few other places different, he noted, was that their culture contained an antidote to Startupicide — such places embrace an ethos that encourages rather than crushes startups and the broader mentality from which they grow. “The problem is not that most towns kill startups. It’s that death is the default for startups, and most towns don’t save them,” Graham notes. “Instead of thinking of most places as being sprayed with startupicide, it’s more accurate to think of startups as all being poisoned, and a few places being sprayed with the antidote.”

Jane Jacobs identified almost exactly the same dynamic when I asked her some years ago why only a handful of places pioneer innovations and unleash the creativity of their residents, while most are content to sputter along, stagnate, and even die. “Each and every community,” she told me, “is filled with lots and lots of creative and innovative people.” The trouble is with a small core of people she dubbed “Squelchers,” who are instinctively opposed to doing anything new or different. Unfortunately, these people are often a town’s business and political leaders. You’ve probably seen them in action; maybe you’ve even bumped up against them yourself.

Only a handful of places are endowed not only with a great research university, but a culture that tolerates and actively encourages risk-taking. Most places prefer to play it safe. But doing more of the same is hardly an option when your prospects are as bleak as they are for so many cities these days. The economic crisis has brought us to a great tipping point, what I have elsewhere termed a Great Reset — an epoch when creative destruction spreads from technologies and industries to society, culture, and geography at large; when new business models, new institutional systems, and new geographic clusters of innovation and risk-taking come to the fore. A Great Reset is one of those rare occasions when “Squelchers” and their old squelching ways are transcended, when more and more people and places can get access to the antidote to startupicide.

….
Despite what the die-hard Squelchers might want you to believe, the Start-Up Nation is growing. Part of this growth pattern is borne of necessity. With the economy in tatters and government all but broke, there’s little choice but to go out and build something for yourself with your colleagues, fellow-travellers, and friends. Startups are much less capital-intensive than they once were. Partly because of the better tools we have at our disposal (the Internet, advanced software, etc.), partly because we live in a more modular economy that allows critical functions, from manufacturing and distribution to design and marketing, to be subcontracted out. Some of it is because others have done it, and we’ve seen what they can do. And a lot of it is from a cultural revolution: the fading of an old dream that saw a good job, a big house, and a big car as the goals by which success was measured, and the emergence of a new one that sees the challenge of building something novel and unique as the key to true fulfillment.

 

I’m working on a piece related to this that I’ll have up shortly.

This post on Seth Godin’s blog, (thanks Instapundit!)  goes right to the heart of what we discuss here….that the old “jobs” based economy has gone.  It’s a good read, and the ending couldn’t ring truer to me:

” No one is demanding that we like the change, but the sooner we see it and set out to become an irreplaceable linchpin, the faster the pain will fade, as we get down to the work that needs to be (and now can be) done. This revolution is at least as big as the last one, and the last one changed everything.”