It is difficult to say that the currently accepted definition of a job, as creating value for an employer that translates into profit, is adequate for the future. It simply applies the wrong metrics to productivity and leaves far too much critical work necessary for a cohesive society undone. By limiting the definition into such narrow terms that benefit only a narrow segment of the population we have stated that the needs of workers not related to their functionality in creating profit, their education, health, both physical and mental, and general level of happiness, are not important, or not important to employers who are the accepted distributors of wages and benefits.
These metrics worked when workers could affect harm to their employer by withholding their labor, making production difficult and more expensive than simply negotiating better wages and benefits. When we decoupled production from consumption by allowing employers to take their production global we lost far more than just the jobs. We lost the concept of community as those wages that supported the commons via local and state taxation were no longer available, or insufficient to support both the worker’s basic needs and the commons. Faced with a choice between basic survival and social capital, social capital will always lose out as people are forced to the bottom level of Maslow’s pyramid where only survival needs matter. The implications of this go well beyond economics and are evident everywhere we look.
In the macroeconomic view, it should make no difference where we source the production of goods as long as consumers are able to purchase them, but the age-old conflict between labor and management was not that easy to set aside. It became necessary to extract profit from both sides of the contract, resources and accumulated wealth of consumers, without some source of stored wealth available to the average worker.
Our problems mostly stem from the efficiency of that extraction, largely enabled by an inept government mired in status quo thinking and its desire to assign blame, to the point where both resources and consumer wealth are now close to depletion and the resulting profit/wealth has been concentrated and effectively beyond the reach of taxation to support the commons.
We, obviously, need to find creative ways to recapitalize consumer demand and restore our commons/social wealth, but we must do so while acknowledging that we no longer have the luxury of assuming infinite resources will be available. This would make the taxation of existing wealth ineffective in securing prosperity, as that wealth represents resources already extracted. We can, and should, tax away much of that wealth that threatens many of the structures of our society, but we would make a big mistake in confining our thinking to the numbers and not consider the limited resources available. Resources can never be recaptured simply by taxing away the wealth they created, thinking we can reinflate demand to fix it all.
Fueling another round of consumption frenzy will doom us all. We have only one shot at getting this right, and I worry that our reliance on our government, and the sociopathic interests that have captured it, to effectively plan our future will only seal our fate. The largest deficit we face at the moment is the one between the ears of our leaders.
