The Labor Theory of Value, 2016
Strangely enough, we're deep into the second decade of "The Knowledge Economy", and the third decade of "The Knowledge Worker", and we have a total brain seizure going on.#
Sure, technology has continued to displace older kinds of labor, and knowledge has continued to both create and leverage the technology. We know the drill.
But the consequence of that -- Change, radical continual Change -- is still not looked at seriously for what it all means.
In a world where knowing how to use tools is the most important thing to having a "livable" personal income (and thus being routinely available for "societal-ly" beneficial enterprise), change means that constant re-learning IS the essential labor of the bulk of work that is going to be valuable.
How much more obvious can it be, then, that being paid to learn is the essential "job" of our times?
One startling punchline, then, is that when whole communities are displaced from older paying work, those communities should be paid to go to school, in their communities, not displaced, and not as a "prerequisite" to earning again, but as their actual primary job until they phase transition to the next application of effort.
Saying it plainly here in spell-checked text is daring only to the extent that our unwillingness to think it through and make it happen is pathetically high.
What is the point of creating "good jobs" if we are not in fact creating stable communities of good-for-the-good-job workers? Why are we, the smartest people ever, and still more often head-for-head parenting than not, having such a difficult time understanding what makes a job "good" ??
It's time for the Knowledge Economy to start paying for knowledge farms instead of just harvesting them and shipping the produce away.
Nathaniel and Patrick, thank you both for your observations! I think that we have to be diligent about how technology ought to be used going forward. In my mind it is clear that the most important purpose of technology is to make problem solving affordable for all people -- the polar opposite of making entertainment lucrative for privileged people. Neither of those two poles is a true characterization of most tech usage today but that doesn't invalidate them as the poles. There are a multitude of health, environment, housing, infrastructure and education problems that I believe are enough of a burden to completely eliminate unemployment and provide livable wage income if they were simply treated with more importance than anything else. And the point would not be to develop the best solution to anything but the point would be to develop a good-enough solution to everything. We have cultural, political and philosophical resistance in many ways to prioritizing that way, not to mention vested financial interests -- but I don't see how any thoughtful person could not expect a vast number of jobs to be created by deciding to deal with these global quality-of-life challenges.
I don't get paid to learn. I get paid to think. It's a subtle difference, but an important one.