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Wednesday, July 21, 2010
This is not a recession; it’s a wonderful world
SIR – These are the very best of times; better than the world has ever seen before.
The only real problem is that we, and especially our politicians, our economists and surprisingly our media refuse to acknowledge it.
Consider for a moment the world we now live in. In the last 20 or 30 years we have extended life expectancy by almost that length, we have conquered most diseases and eradicated physical pain, we have provided choices of foods, entertainment, leisure, travel, communication and many other items on a scale unimaginable two decades ago. We have created a virtual paradise here on earth.
We have everything we ever needed in abundance; the only thing we are short of is jobs.
And if we continue our present direction of recovery from the crisis, “the recession”, we may cause the jobs situation to destroy us or at least bring untold misery to many of us. This is not a recession, it is the wonderful new world we have created.
We must realise that jobs as we know them will never again be available in adequate numbers to distribute wealth as they have done until now. The very thing that has given us the good life has in the process eliminated a huge amount of work. All the planning and hoping and praying in the world will never un-invent technology. The jobs will not return. We don’t need them to produce anymore, we just need them to distribute the wealth as wages.
And if looked at properly this is a very good thing. Why should people have to work so hard and so long since their work is not needed?
If we are so insistent that everyone should work so hard and so long, why not send them out on the new motorway construction schemes with shovels and wheelbarrows.
Unemployment would be eliminated at a stroke. This is no more crazy an idea than some of the schemes being proposed.
Sure, some work will always remain and sure we should encourage the creation of as many jobs as we can but only in the context of sharing that work as widely as possible. One approach would be a move towards shorter hours, say 20 a week. And what would be wrong with longer holidays, three months perhaps, and later entry into and earlier retirement from the workplace. That is why the policy of job cutting and later retirement is so misguided, defying the gravity of work trends all over the world.
How can we afford it you ask? Because for the first time in human history we can produce more than we can consume and that is real wealth. All the jobs in the world ever did was try to produce enough, and technology has cracked that nut for us. And eliminated most of the jobs in the process, many of them boring, soul destroying and tedious and only made tolerable by the social contact they allowed. That social contact would be even better in coffee shops or gems or in the park. Good riddance to a lot of the work.
The world should celebrate rather than cower in fear and trepidation. We have been liberated from work, we no longer need to “earn our bread by the sweat of our brow”; well not so much sweat anyway. All we have to do is devise a method of sharing our success and good fortune without such reliance on work and jobs. We have to learn to cope with success.
Yours sincerely,
Padraic Neary,
Tubbercurry, Co Sligo
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