Sunday, June 24, 2012

The full enjoyment economy


This post should actually be a book, but I don't have the time right now. I will work on it. The message is a timely one, however, and needs attention.

The current national political battle is largely based on the stated challenge of creating jobs. Each political party is pointing fingers at the other, drawing attention to perceived shortcomings in their job creating programs. This is for good reason. In the last several years, the employment record in the U.S. and in the other industrialized nations has not been good. There are some subordinate themes, outsourcing and globalization being two of the more predominant perceived threats to full employment.

Unfortunately, the condition seems to be somewhat permanent. This is a problem with potentially catastrophic implications for many, individuals and institutions, further stratifying society and transferring financial burdens to governments, the payers of last resort.

The condition as we understand it is nested in our history, in the longstanding challenges of supporting life on the planet for individuals, family groups, and other associations. For thousands of years, our ancestors have lived in need and in want. They had a production problem. Survival was achieved on the most atomistic of levels. If they didn't work, they didn't eat.

Safety and security were outgrowths of the scarcity problem. There has always been a tendency for some to extort others, to take away their goods, including their food, their productive capacity, and the fruits of their labor. For this, military, political, and social steps were taken for protection beginning husbands, wives, and their families. This is a primary reason for male dominance as it has existed through time. Fathers and grown sons could be counted on to give families the best chances at survival. It was groups of men that fought to protect or to destroy.

We do not now have a production problem. Well, actually, we do, but the problem is not one of production limits; it is something of the opposite. In virtually all sectors, we can produce far more than is consumed. The commercial challenge now is to not produce more that you can sell. If productive enterprises do not assiduously manage their inventories, they are going to incrementally impoverish themselves and lose their competitive edge.

An example of our lack of a production problem is in the food stamp situation in the United States. Since the 2007 economic correction, food stamp distribution has increased from something like twenty million subscribers to almost fifty million system users. Under such a system, food is available without cost, paid for my government. The fact is, no one expresses concern that such food cannot be made available by commercial producers. Fulfillment is made through existing food markets that consistently produce to meet current levels of demand. Without the food stamp program, they would have produced less. This would surely have resulted in industry hardship, not to mention personal and familial need. If the food stamp program had resulted in seventy-five million subscribers, with some challenges in terms of adjusting to the need for increased capacity, there is little question that such demand could be met. Obviously there are limits as to the productivity of the earth. Population control proponents tend to lose sleep over them. On the other hand, there are many untried innovations and untilled acres that could be brought into production to meet the need if production demands were higher.

This is true of many if not all industries. They function in a state of suspended control. We could have more of everything if there is someone available to pay. Two industries I believe are special cases, both of them counter to the best interests of society. First is the medical system, particularly that in the industrialized world. In many studies, this sector is considered to be the only dependable job source. If this is the case, it is indeed a pathetic example of economic failure. Is our economy is dependent on people becoming ill? Wouldn't we be better off by eradicating all diseases, particularly the chronic, ugly, life-sapping ones? I do not believe that we are really trying. The second particularly problematic industry are those that encourage dependence on petrochemicals for common energy use. There has been precious little effort to improve such sectors for at least half a century. Both of these sectors are galling examples of necronomy and levy unnecessary economic burdens to us all. In this sense, we suffer from such economic parasites that have been positioned as employers and economic drivers. We are a clever race. We should be able to derive better solutions.

What if the full employment problem is intractable due to a newly-achieved reality? What all of us do not need to work in order to meet the requirements of life? What if lower employment levels as defined by government statistics and supported by our educational, economic, and social institutions are permanent  conditions? What if the reason employment levels do not increase is that productive organizations do not and will not again need to achieve traditional employment levels?

Related to such possible queries, there is another potentially shocking consideration. If we were to not need to employ ourselves in extended employment activities in the form of time-intensive "jobs", what would we do with our time?

I have spent decades now in either the private or the public sector. In my experience, most organizations suffer from significant levels of over-employment. In fact, many organizations are peopled with workers, managers, executives, etc., who "gum up the works" with bad attitudes, poor habits, caustic behaviors, and a constant flow of misrepresentations. They are miserable and they want to make sure that everyone else is miserable. They come to work for one thing and for one thing only: Money. Well, there is a related factor: Power. Typically they are related. In most cases, you can see that those who are least happy at work are fixated on money and power to the detriment of the organization as a whole. As they say, the happy professor and the good one teaches; the unhappy one goes into administration.

Given the need to present themselves for "work" as a social prerequisite regardless of a real need or an adequate match with their interests and natural talents, people obsess over money and power, their abundance or scarcity. If they have to present themselves, if they have to do what they are told, if they have to work in their job to get the money they need, they are surely going to insist on extracting every last cent. Everything else (and everyone else) be damned!

My observation is that society, and especially the educational system, have failed many if not most people in this regard. Because of the need to have a "job" and the poor showing of the educational system in helping people find and leverage their natural talents in a timely manner, people come to believe that they must "grind it out" for life. If you have seen the movie "Joe vs. the Volcano", you know what I mean. In fact, you needn't have seen the show to know what I mean. Except for the fortunate few, the working world is a hellish place.

What if there were an option to follow your dream, to follow your inner talents and ambitions? First off, there would need to be a far better way of systematically evaluating what these are. Dell Allen, my mentor in many ways, pointed me in this direction about three years ago by showing me a long-forgotten literature in the definition and evaluation of native talents. There, you can see available instruments to identify about two hundred human abilities. These could well form the basis for a new, more meaningful and successful educational system. We should have "Talent Olympics" in the schools and in society at several stages, identifying, encouraging, and educating children as well as adults based on these natural talents. They should be matched up with others with similar talents for learning and encouragement.

The fact that we are not doing this in a systematic way constitutes a vast waste. This is not just a science and technology issue, every unidentified and unsupported natural talent is a personal and a national catastrophe to some degree. As a result, we are largely wasting our lives. Related to this is untold economic loss. Possibly more importantly, we are thus overwhelmingly and unnecessarily unhappy as country and as a race. I believe that these losses result from policies and traditions that force people into work arrangements that they do not enjoy, and that they are not very good at. In many cases, these jobs are not needed for legitimate productive purposes.

As to the needs of the productive sector, Deming probably said it best. We are suffering from a "best efforts" crisis in our productive systems. People are doing their best although they don't really know what to do. As a result, things come out poorly. Such unproductive people, education aside, should not work in the productive sector, in the manufacture of goods and services that meet peoples' basic needs, such as food, energy, construction, and transportation. They should be doing what they do best as identified in the "Talent Olympics" using effective instruments and the support of people in those sectors.

Yes, I have read Kurt Vonnegut's "The Piano Player". It was required reading in my MBA thirty years ago and I reread it last year. In a way, it makes the case for what I am talking about here.

Several years ago, I had a good relationship with the department head in my doctoral program. He was well into his seventies and he wielded a good deal of power, particularly the power of the budget. He had put together a sizable personal net worth in the process. We worked together quite closely for a few years. At one point he confided in me with regard his career. He hadn't really enjoyed it. The fact is, what he had always wanted to do was to be a groundskeeper for the Los Angeles Dodgers. That, he said, would have been a wonderful life, better than fighting in the trenches at a university.

Of course, this could have simply been an idle comment. With age, we can all think of such turns in the road. At the time, I said to him, "Do it now. I'll bet they would take you on, especially since you don't need their money." He said that he should and that he would think about it, but he didn't take that step although he had a winter home near the training camp. Sadly, he died within the year.

In a way, this isn't really what I am getting at, but it kind of is. There is an apocryphal country music song that goes, "I would rather be miserable with you than happy with somebody else". The full employment mantra that underscores the current economic structure is probably based on a false assumption, that we need the productive efforts of too many people to meet our basic needs. Rather than requiring that such rewards be funneled through made up jobs created for just this purpose, we should be working to assure that our people are actively fulfilling their talents and are thus more happy. We will likely find that the greed index, for one, will come way down. As to the talents that are not being identified and encouraged, I think that we will enjoy them very, very much. This will in turn help us to overcome that greatest fear of all: A populace with time on its hands.

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