The History of Jobs In America

http://www.treehugger.com/corporate-responsibility/the-history-of-jobs-in-america.html

não se pode falar em resiliência económica sem olhar para a estrutura de emprego (não propriamente trabalhadores por conta de outrém, foco comum da economia do trabalho). A estrutura de emprego agrega em profissões a disponibilidade de skills e capacidade de produção/transformação. Vivemos em economias de mercado, meaning, as ocupações do ser humano e poder para satisfazer necessidades estão hiper concentradas na estrutura moeda-mercado-divisão do trabalho - todos precisamos de um trabalho remunerado para adquirir os bens e serviços no mercado. Uma economia de mercado resiliente pressupoe uma estrtura de emprego resiliente. Por outras palavras, em última instancia, a produtividade, conhecimento, capacidade de transformação da economia, está nas pessoas: no tempo, energia, produtividade, skills que dedicam a tarefas concretas - profissoes - os elementos base na tabela periódica da economia de mercado, que as empresas/instituições vão combinar.

pst: claro que, se caminharmos/transitarmos para outra forma de funcionamento em sociedade que não a dominante economia de mercado, a estrutura de emprego perde relevância para estudar resiliencia económica. As pessoas terão outras ocupações económicas que não um emprego, os skills não estarão tão resumidos em profissões.

The end of capitalism has begun

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun

The scene is Kentish Town, London, February 1858, sometime around 4am. Marx is a wanted man in Germany and is hard at work scribbling thought-experiments and notes-to-self. When they finally get to see what Marx is writing on this night, the left intellectuals of the 1960s will admit that it “challenges every serious interpretation of Marx yet conceived”. It is called “The Fragment on Machines”.

In the “Fragment” Marx imagines an economy in which the main role of machines is to produce, and the main role of people is to supervise them. He was clear that, in such an economy, the main productive force would be information. The productive power of such machines as the automated cotton-spinning machine, the telegraph and the steam locomotive did not depend on the amount of labour it took to produce them but on the state of social knowledge. Organisation and knowledge, in other words, made a bigger contribution to productive power than the work of making and running the machines.

Given what Marxism was to become – a theory of exploitation based on the theft of labour time – this is a revolutionary statement. It suggests that, once knowledge becomes a productive force in its own right, outweighing the actual labour spent creating a machine, the big question becomes not one of “wages versus profits” but who controls what Marx called the “power of knowledge”.

In an economy where machines do most of the work, the nature of the knowledge locked inside the machines must, he writes, be “social”. In a final late-night thought experiment Marx imagined the end point of this trajectory: the creation of an “ideal machine”, which lasts forever and costs nothing. A machine that could be built for nothing would, he said, add no value at all to the production process and rapidly, over several accounting periods, reduce the price, profit and labour costs of everything else it touched.

Once you understand that information is physical, and that software is a machine, and that storage, bandwidth and processing power are collapsing in price at exponential rates, the value of Marx’s thinking becomes clear. We are surrounded by machines that cost nothing and could, if we wanted them to, last forever.

In these musings, not published until the mid-20th century, Marx imagined information coming to be stored and shared in something called a “general intellect” – which was the mind of everybody on Earth connected by social knowledge, in which every upgrade benefits everybody. In short, he had imagined something close to the information economy in which we live. And, he wrote, its existence would “blow capitalism sky high”.

INCLUSIVE GROWTH, FULL EMPLOYMENT, AND STRUCTURAL CHANGE

Implications and Policies for Developing Asia

Jesus Felipe Asian Development Bank jfelipe@adb.org

http://www.worldacademy.org/files/INCLUSIVE%20GROWTH%20LAUNCH%20Jesus%20Felipe.pdf

The Lie We Live

The main purpose of the system cannot be "to grow". At maximum, growth that can only be a mean to an end - to be happy. And not always grow is the path for human beings to be happier. But we've been following growth as the end to be achieved. We forgot our ultimate goal, the fundamental function of the system.

Need to redefine the fundamental function of the system, of our social-economic form of organization --> need to know ourselves better in order to know what makes us happy --> this is the meaning of being alive and should be the fundamental function of the system, around which we organize our social-economic activities

5 Ways to Lessen Inequality as Demand for Labor Decreases Worldwide

Aashish Mehta  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aashish-mehta/5-ways-lesson-inequality_b_6215708.html

"Wages, incomes and wealth in most countries have become more unequally distributed in recent decades. Most of us understand that this is politically dangerous. There is much less unanimity regarding how national governments should go about addressing this. I argue here that one key source of growing inequality is a softening of the demand for labor and that this changes policy debates significantly.

(...) To better understand how to deal with softening demand for people, we must understand its causes and structure. In which economies and sectors has labor demand gone soft?

(...) Given these structural roots to inequality, what types of policies make sense? Solutions will have to be context-appropriate. However, to be effective and politically sustainable, they will require the support of those they benefit directly, and of those who fund them or think they might. In other words, they will need to be compromise solutions that appeal to left and right alike by achieving the most redistribution for the least bureaucracy and inefficiency. In that spirit, here are five ideas that might be useful for combating inequality in a world of softening labor demand.

1. Shift the tax burden off labor.

2. Design policies that can augment incomes when many people don't have stable jobs.

3. Redirect efforts to protect working conditions and wages at non-tradable sectors.

4. Make competition policy more robust.

5. Think about education policy differently.

None of these policy suggestions are novel, and all have downsides. Recognizing that inequality has structural roots in low-labor demand does not necessarily change the menu of policy options to consider. It alters the tradeoffs between these options. Clearly, these tradeoffs are changing."

The future of jobs

The onrushing wave

Previous technological innovation has always delivered more long-run employment, not less. But things can change

"IN 1930, when the world was “suffering…from a bad attack of economic pessimism”, John Maynard Keynes wrote a broadly optimistic essay, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”. It imagined a middle way between revolution and stagnation that would leave the said grandchildren a great deal richer than their grandparents. But the path was not without dangers.

One of the worries Keynes admitted was a “new disease”: “technological unemployment…due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.” His readers might not have heard of the problem, he suggested—but they were certain to hear a lot more about it in the years to come.

(...) Everyone should be able to benefit from productivity gains—in that, Keynes was united with his successors. His worry about technological unemployment was mainly a worry about a “temporary phase of maladjustment” as society and the economy adjusted to ever greater levels of productivity. So it could well prove. However, society may find itself sorely tested if, as seems possible, growth and innovation deliver handsome gains to the skilled, while the rest cling to dwindling employment opportunities at stagnant wages."

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21594264-previous-technological-innovation-has-always-delivered-more-long-run-employment-not-less?fsrc=scn/fb/te/pe/ed/

The human capital controversy

why is “human capital” such a disastrous turn of phrase? There are two reasons. First, it obfuscates the crucial difference between labor and capital by terminologically conflating the two. Labor now seems to be just a subspecies of capital. Second and more important, it leads to a perception — and sometimes to the argument used by insufficiently careful economists — that all individuals, whether owners of real capital or not, are basically capitalists. Even if you have human capital and I have financial capital, we are fundamentally the same. Entirely lost is the key distinction that for you to get an income from your human capital, you have to work. For me to get an income from my financial capital, I do not.

As I see it, all these new forms of capital, like human capital, are ways of expanding Smith’s wealth of nations; they all seen as contributing to the production of more “stuff”—more use-values, the “immense accumulation of commodities.” But the expanding universe of capital also serves to hide the extent to which all that stuff, which is in reality socially produced, is then privately appropriated—leading to a growing gap between a tiny minority at the top and everyone else. In other words, it’s a pattern of private capitalist appropriation that creates a more and more unequal distribution of income and wealth.

The capital controversy will remain with us, then, as long as we refuse to solve the problem of capital.

https://rwer.wordpress.com/2015/02/22/the-human-capital-controversy/

Failing on Two Fronts: The U.S. Labor Market Since 2000

"In a new CEPR report out today, I argue that the US labor market is failing on two fronts. The first failure is the decades-long stagnation of real wages at the middle and the bottom of the wage scale –even as earnings at the top have grown rapidly. The second failure, only apparent since the early 2000s, is the sharp deterioration in job creation. "

TFF: might also be that the share of jobs in individual occupations is decreasing; plus, it is decreasing more in low income individuals than in high income individuals, meaning rich individuals depend more (and each time more) on wages/jobs for satisfaction of their needs (physical, social, individual, spiritual, etc.) then poor individuals - in part because if poor individuals have denied access to jobs, people find other solutions. With the generalization of technology and easier access to information/knowledge/people the logistics are easier and transition communities are growing like mushrooms. Internet revolution is still playing cards and showing its effects and changing people and society's way of living. Technology is accelerating change. People will depend less and less on jobs. I believe there will always be room and need for markets/jobs/money. The weight of markets in society have been growing since centuries ago. I'd say jobs reached 90% weight in people's wealth in USA. And maybe it is declining, giving room to other types of social organization/society, non-market, or at least non-labour-market ones.