Kurr Cobb, Emperor Vespasian has a solution for unemployment (EB)
Of course, much of the manual work which used to be performed in the United States is now done in the Far East, particularly China. And, the kind of work that most factory workers do there might very well be considered drudgery by many people. Hall's point, however, was two-fold. First, impending declines in available energy to society will likely force such work closer to the markets it serves. This is because rising transportation costs will diminish the advantage of worldwide manufacturing webs in favor of regional and local ones. Second, manual labor often requires skills that we in the United States do not teach as widely as we used to. We aren't ready to make the things we once made. And, all of this remains true even as the ranks of the unemployed swell and energy costs continue to climb.
Certainly, Vespasian's attitude would have prevented the immense advances in productivity of the modern age. But since those advances are largely premised on the growing availability of cheap energy inputs, we may need to re-examine our attitude as those energy inputs become constrained and thus are no longer cheap.
Moreover, continued policies that lessen opportunities for manual labor will, of necessity, doom an entire group of people to the unemployment rolls just because their intelligence shows through in what they make with their hands rather than what they say or write.
I am not here romanticizing backbreaking labor. The one place that mechanization has failed to progress very much in the last few decades is the picking of fruit. Researchers had been looking for ways to harvest fruit mechanically. But an onslaught of cheap immigrant labor into the United States from the 1980s onward pushed real wages down for farm labor so far that mechanized fruit picking did not seem worth the effort. Even in the exploitative world of farm labor the laws of supply and demand apply. An avalanche of new workers depressed wages and doomed the mechanization effort.
Biggest Find in Decades Becomes $39 Billion Cautionary Tale
Farming:
Young Farmers Face Huge Obstacles to Getting Started
Relocalization:
Outline of the "Transition Companion" by Rob Hopkins
Economy:
via KG: The Coming Chinese Crash: Every Chinese Province is Like Greece
OWS
John Robb, OCCUPY NOTE 11/20/11: The HIDDEN logic of the Occupy Movement
Shikha Dalmia Gives Reason’s Game Away: Leftism Before Libertarianism!
History:
Louis Daguerre and the pioneers of photography
The Importance of Tang Dynasty Mothers to the Family Education
Maimonides: an early but accurate view on the treatment of haemorrhoids
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